


i hate everything about you

by silentsaint



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII Remake (Video Game 2020)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study?, Complicated Relationships, Enemies in love, Hypothetical Major Character Death, M/M, Pining, bro ur in love, sephiroth being a dramatic bitch for 1000 words, sephiroth deals with emotions he does not know the name of, the odd entwinement of obsession and admiration
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-29
Updated: 2020-08-29
Packaged: 2021-03-06 23:22:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26167093
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silentsaint/pseuds/silentsaint
Summary: We love beautiful things. We try to keep them close.
Relationships: Sephiroth & Cloud Strife, Sephiroth/Cloud Strife
Comments: 13
Kudos: 130





	i hate everything about you

**Author's Note:**

> A great amount of the sephcloud/sefikura fic I see, especially the canonverse stuff, is majority written from Cloud's perspective. Just as a personal exercise, since much of what I myself write would also fall into that category, I wanted to try something else for a change.

‘Summer’ is the word that first comes to mind.

Yes. Cloud Strife is indeed like the summer, overly hot and scorching at times, but blissfully warm and gentle in others. His gentleness is mostly reserved for those he cares for, but it’s easy to predict the inevitable, how the pieces of him that roil with heat still occasionally end up burning others on mere proximity. 

It is a fairly undisputed fact that certain kinds of cold have such an intensity that to human sensation they feel warm. Sephiroth wonders if the same is true in reverse, and if a heat that glows with a volcano’s ire can feel as cold as the void.

Strife is certainly a contradiction, if nothing else. 

He’s very beautiful, for one thing. The memories of humanity that rest within himself do not carry the conventional structure of such appreciation, merely stray bits acquired over the years, much of which are contained either in a smooth voice of theatrical demeanor, or a cold one listing off psychological drivers in a bland tone. 

_It begs the question of if ‘beauty’ is real at all, or merely another delusion fostered by frail humanity._

But the fact remains that when he looks at Strife, the presence of a unique and poignant _beauty_ is indisputable. There is no other word for it.

Cloud Strife is beautiful in the way the dawn is beautiful, in the way that the sun turns the sky a very pale blue before it has fully risen in radiance. The pale ivory of his skin, the flaxen of his hair, the softness in his eyes when he thinks no one is looking. That gentleness is so easily belied by the fury with which he fights, that single minded focus of destruction and domination.

Just like the summer. Soft and vibrant to look at, hot enough to burn when you try to touch it.

_How lucky, to be the target of such a rage, sharpened and intensified into a celestial spear meant to rend me in pieces._

How lucky indeed, for such a unique man to gift him with the beauty of his anger.

Cloud Strife is beautiful in the way a storm is beautiful, in the way it indiscriminately tears apart both the tree and the shanty. In the way his body flexes and whirls, able to not only keep up with the Calamity’s son but to best him.

_Both beautiful and terrible, as you ripped me from my godhood and sent me careening into the darkened abyss._

‘Beautiful’ as a word, as a concept, utterly fails to describe all that Cloud is. And yet despite that, there is no word better, or at least not one he can conjure up yet.

There are a few hazy memories at the edges of his consciousness, of Cloud as a trooper, from before he awakened to his own new purpose and set a flame to the mountain town. Wide eyed and skittish, following Fair around like a lost duckling rather than a Shinra trooper. A wisp of a young man, utterly unlikely to make it into the SOLDIER program, and yet still carrying around an expression of awkward and youthful determination.

Such a different expression, that same youthful face turned up at him in fear and hatred, blazing bright. The boy who could not only put a blade in him but who could throw Sephiroth off his feet with only the leverage of the sword that Sephiroth had already _impaled_ him with.

He had wanted to see the boy suffer, as both a penance and a reward for wounding him. That was all that had kept him from landing a killing blow then and there. 

_How lucky,_ he thinks. _If I had killed you then, I would never have had this._

Cloud Strife glowers up at him with a scowl that could curdle the blood of grown men, and Sephiroth smiles at his own inhumanity. 

_His eyes glow especially bright when he’s wreathed in shadows. It accentuates the blue._

Cloud Strife is lovely indeed. Perhaps the most enrapturing thing to still grace the surface of the earth, in Sephiroth’s personal opinion. Maturity has gifted him with an extra inch or two of height, and now the flame that burns at the heart of his hatred is even more resplendent in it’s fury. The flower has bloomed in earnest, and the pale spring leaves nothing to be remembered in the face of a blistering summer.

Perhaps it’s because of the warmth that runs wild through his bloodstream, when he fights Cloud, that it’s so easy to compare the young man to the elegance of a candle. Flickering persistently on in the vastness of Sephiroth’s night.

_For if Cloud is the candle, then I am the dark shroud meant to suffocate him. Something that will both consume him, and be consumed by him._

Such is the nature of things.

A young man with Mako gleaming in his eyes, face suffused by loathing and twisted by a peculiar brand of torment. The pain in his eyes only adds to the picture already present, granting ascension to a masterpiece that was once a mere human creation.

Sometimes, Sephiroth wonders about what it would be like to have that same picture of loveliness spread out before him, eyes bright and wild and staring up at Sephiroth with the intent to kill. It’s always the same between them, and the closer they draw to one another the more at odds they seem to become.

This dance ends with one of them at the end of a sword, soul fluttering outwards and into the oblivion of the Lifestream. But the oblivion that seeks to claim him is of pitiable strength compared to the bonds entwining him with the man with eyes like the shimmering depths of the sea.

For some reason, the idea of Cloud finally bleeding out at the end of Masamune, face going slack in death and limbs falling either limp or coiled tighter in rigor mortis, does not carry as much attraction as it once did. Perhaps it is the fleeting nature of the picture, of how Cloud’s predictable frustration and rage at his loss would fade and ebb away all too quickly.

Perhaps it is the fact that a flame can only be beautiful in life. The wispy trails of smoke it leaves behind afterwards can never hope to compare.

Sometimes, an image flashes before his eyes, of Cloud in the moment before the young man’s body is rended in two by a gleaming flash of silver, of the moment his eyes widen and he is aware that his life is over. Sometimes the fancy strikes of Cloud begging for his life as he bleeds out, of broken and pleading supplications directed at him as a shattered form of worship.

And sometimes, in his fantasies, Cloud merely bows his head, shuts his eyes, and lies still with an exhausted mien. It is those fantasies that he likes the least, despite how beautiful Cloud’s pale face would appear once the blood has all drained away to paint him in reverent crimson.

It bothers him that the thought of Cloud motionless and fading into slender threads of emerald bothers him.

_The Lifestream will not claim me, nor will it claim what is mine. This is the order of things that was intended by my birthright._

And so Cloud’s eyes continue to gleam, a crystal maelstrom of ocean depths and pulsing Mako. He remains largely in one piece, internal organs intact and in their proper place. His face is unmarred by obvious scarring, and all of his various ears and fingers and other paraphernalia remain where they are. 

The kiss of Masamune is a coiling snake, biting and clawing and drawing blood at will, but it’s touch is not immutable. Cloud stands before him once again, eyes on fire and gleaming with the radiance of _life._

Confounding, isn’t it, that Sephiroth finds he likes him that way.

**Author's Note:**

> [twitter](https://twitter.com/SEFIKURAS) || [tumblr](https://sephirothcrescent.tumblr.com/)


End file.
